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Mars Rover Reaches Victoria Crater
gevmage writes, "CNN reports that the 'Opportunity' rover on Mars has reached the Victoria crater. The rovers Spirit and Opportunity arrived on Mars three years ago with planned mission lifetime of 90 days. The rover Spirit is wounded, having only 5 of 6 wheels functioning, and so it's moving quite slowly. However, Opportunity is still going strong and has been trucking towards the massive crater Victoria for almost the past year. Scientists have been hoping that Opportunity would get there so they can have a look at geologically older areas — and it's finally made it!" See the NASA press release for links to photos of the Victoria crater.
Spirit and Opportunity are some seriously tough robots. My hat is off to the engineering teams that built them. How much longer will they go?
Seeing projects like this really gives me hope about the space program. I mean, look at the ROI on this project: for a project that was only supposed to last 90 days, we've gotten over 1000 days of use out of it. Kinda makes up for the other "crater" project... =)
Honestly not trying to troll, but no, sorry, this does not restore my faith in humanity at all. Unfortunately, there are far too many things happening every day (take the recent school shooting in Colorado, for instance) to continually keep my faith in humanity pretty much nonexistant.
And while our exploration of space at this point does have practical applications for current-day life, a lot of it is also just a "cool, let's see what we can learn" sort of thing. Which, again, is of use both today as well as in the future. But with the way things are going here on Earth right now (The environment, anyone? Wars? Etc.), who knows if we'll ever really be able to put a lot of our knowledge from space exploration to full use and truly reach the final frontier.
This mission has been such a great success. I think it has fallen off the radar of most people who don't realize that they are still out there. NASA needs some better PR to capitalize on great science. NASA needs credit where credit is due, not for the ISS, but for true exploration.
Imagine how many scientific discoveries and inventions might never have been made if there were no wars.
Have you noticed that the countries with the largest militaries are the one's with the most capable space programs? Have you noticed that the countries with socialized medicine and minimal military are not in space, or they largely piggy back on the former? I think things are a bit more complex than you suggest. Now I'm all for greatly increasing NASA's funding, but getting rid of the Pentagon will do more harm to NASA than good. The place to cut the budget is all the damn pork projects that do nothing other than get incumbants re-elected. Some of these are in the Pentagon, but many are outside of it. Pork is one of the few things conservatives and liberals agree on.
"The most expensive thing in the world is a second-best military establishment, good but not good enough to win."
Robert A. Heinlein
Various mechanisms involving dust, wind, steep slopes, etc. have been proposed, see this article.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
And in the case of Germany, the rewards are great for the losers. I'm no historian, but everything presented so far leads me to believe that Germany was much better off after WWII than it was before. I suspect Japan is too, but it may be that I am looking though too thick a cloud of cultural bias.
I would agree that in the long run, they have been better off, and that has happened often in history.
Have you noticed that since the Geneva Convention was signed, and the UN formed, no country has been better off afterwards? Or that no one has been treated better, except by the "Evil Empire" et al.? And that there are just as many wars, and they are just as deadly, but they don't end fast due to limitations in the Convention? AND if we were under the Geneva Convention during WW2, we would not have been able to bomb civilians, factories or nuke anyone? Notice a trend?
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
The rover Spirit is wounded, having only 5 of 6 wheels functioning, and so it's moving quite slowly.
Actually, spirit has stopped because it does not have enough power to move very far during Martian winter, and they would rather camp it on a small slope facing the sun than risk getting stuck without sunlight and freezing its parts to death. Spirit camped last Martian winter also for several weeks for a similar reason.
When Winter is finished (soon), it will rove again. However, it will not be near as nimble as it was with all 6 wheels.
Opportunity is at a slightly better lattitude for sunlight, and has been on flat areas this winter, so it does not need such winter camping.
Table-ized A.I.
On the other hand, you look at this accomplishment, and then you wonder why the world's most popular operating system is successfully attacked by 13 year olds.
What was once true, is no longer so
The countries with space programs are the ones big enough and rich enough to afford it, and the desire to impress one's neighbours. First it was the USA and the Soviets. Then it was the Europeans, Japanese, and Chinese (no, the Europeans and Japanese don't have their own crewed launch vehicles, but the Europeans are planning to build one). The Indians are in the advanced stages of a moon probe. Key common factors: big economies. Key differences: almost everything else.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The US ingored blantantly most of the Geneva convention during the Vietnam War.
Vietnam, in spite of this, is better off now.
This is due to adopting market reforms and has nothing to do with the existence of the UN or the Geneva convention.
How in your mind economic development after a war is linked to reasonbale safeguards against butal behaviour is beyond my comprehension.
We have seen plenty of conflicts (Burundi, Rwanda, Congo, Yugoslavia) in which the Geneva conventions and the UN were just meaningles words and the countries that suffered these conflicts don't seem much better off for it , as a matter of fact, not respecting such conventions becomes a deterrent for progress and investment, as the US sponsored situations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine sadly shows.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Your instinct is incorrect. The "single larger rover" is going to last FAR longer than the MERs, unless something breaks. But it won't be due to the power source; it's RTG powered. It will also be able to drive faster and farther than the MERs. And do a lot more science.
The MER-sized rover is obviously a good design, but they have many drawbacks. For one thing, they really were TOO heavy -- the airbag landing system nearly failed, and the small chute really is vulnerable to high horizontal winds. Moreover, the MER landing system only allows landing such rovers near the equator and near sea level... you can't use them at the poles, or to land on top of, say, Mt. Olympus, because there's not enough atmosphere between space and the ground.
So yes, there is a lot of science that can be done by sending more MER rovers. But they aren't the answer to every Mars mission's needs. We can really only afford to send a couple of probes every two years, and over the next few years we're going to be sending probes to do other things and investigate other places where a MER probe wouldn't work. Will we see more MER-class probes 6-12 years from now? Probably.
Bruce